The circular economy (CE) has risen to the top of global policy agendas, with high expectations that it is the new win-win-win sustainability strategy. Over the last decades, the global IE community and many other scholars have built the scientific basis of the CE, by compiling a tremendously large body of research on material stocks and flows, environmental assessments of resource efficiency strategies, business models for ‘closing the loop’, and many more topics broadly related to the CE.
It’s time to take stock and summarize this research! Inspired by the 2023 White Paper (van Ewijk et al. (2023) [1], which highlights a number of core insights for the sustainable development of industrial production and consumption, a team from the ISIE-CE and ISIE-SEM sections set out to review the CE literature and synthesize the established body of knowledge into Stylized Facts about the CE. Stylized facts [2] about the CE are general aggregated statements about properties, potentials, and constraints of the CE that everyone dealing with the CE should know and adhere to.
Examples of such facts could include (don’t cite them, they’re preliminary :) )
- Material production contributes to 20-25% to total global warming, and many of the major material production processes are technically difficult and costly to decarbonize, currently very little deployment beyond TRL 6-7. (derived from energy and GHG statistics and the literature, high evidence, high agreement)
- When in-use stocks grow in a certain region, e.g., increase of copper in electric vehicles, the material required for stock expansion must come from other stocks, and in most cases (lack of scrap from other stocks or regions), from natural resource extraction. (derived from first principles)
- The strongest link between CE and climate change mitigation is via using less materials, not via recycling them better (derived from scenario assessments, medium evidence, medium agreement)
- The average lifetime of metals in the techno-sphere is low (down to less than 50 years for copper, 100-300 years for steel), but the GHG and toxicity impacts created by metal ore mining, smelting, and refining will last for millennia! (derived from scenario modelling and impact assessment; medium evidence, high agreement)
This compilation of what do we know about the current status and the potential for a CE would be the basis for further dissemination to decision makers and the general public.
The plan is to compile a document (current goal is to turn it into a JIE Forum piece) that lists the facts that we’ll be able to synthesize (grouped into, e.g., ‘first principles’, ‘raw materials’, ‘economic value’, ‘energy and GHG’, …). For each fact, a supplementary document will contain 2-4 pages of review that lists and discusses the evidence, counter-evidence, and knowledge gaps, and justifies the evidence-agreement ranking.
The timeline is as follows:
- October-November ’24: Convene a team of 10-20 experts to contribute to review
- Kick-off meeting during the 2024 Industrial Ecology Day on November 21: Short-list candidates for CE stylized facts and discuss how to best group them
- Early December ’24: Divide review tasks to contributors according to preliminary list of CE facts/topics (need your commitment at this stage)
- Jan-Feb ’25: review ongoing
- March ’25: synthesis meetings
- April-June ’25: additional iterations and review
- July ’25: Submission to JIE and archiving on preprint server.
Please reach out to stefan.pauliuk@indecol.uni-freiburg.de if you would like to contribute to this activity! Deadline for expression of interest (no commitment yet): Oct. 31st. Next to actual review contributions, suggestions for candidates for stylized facts about the CE are much appreciated, especially those covering economic aspects! Like “Massive job creation in the CE will only happen if business models and financial incentives change (e.g., via a tax reform).” The core review team could then start corroborating this statement or debunking it based on the available evidence.
Looking forward to working with you!
References
[1] van Ewijk, S., Ashton, W. S., Berrill, P., Cao, Z., Chertow, M., Chopra, S. S., Fishman, T., Fitzpatrick, C., Heidrich, O., Leipold, S., Ritter, F., Sprecher, B., Yao, Y., Myers, R. J. (2023). Ten insights from industrial ecology for the circular economy. Leiden, The Netherlands: International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE).
